xx, 941 pages, 32 unnumbered pages of plates : 24 cm

"Acclaimed historian Richard White offers a fresh and integrated interpretation of Reconstruction and the Gilded Age as the seedbed of modern America. At the end of the Civil War the leaders and citizens of the victorious North envisioned the country's future as a free-labor republic, with a homogenous citizenry, both black and white. The South and West were to be reconstructed in the image of the North. Thirty years later Americans occupied an unimagined world. The unity that the Civil War supposedly secured had proved ephemeral. The country was larger, richer, and more extensive, but also more diverse. Life spans were shorter, and physical well-being had diminished, due to disease and hazardous working conditions. Independent producers had become wage earners. The country was Catholic and Jewish as well as Protestant, and increasingly urban and industrial. The "dangerous" classes of the very rich and poor expanded, and deep differences--ethnic, racial, religious, economic, and political--divided society. The corruption that gave the Gilded Age its name was pervasive. These challenges also brought vigorous efforts to secure economic, moral, and cultural reforms. Real change--technological, cultural, and political--proliferated from below more than emerging from political leadership. Americans, mining their own traditions and borrowing ideas, produced creative possibilities for overcoming the crises that threatened their country. In a work as dramatic and colorful as the era it covers, White narrates the conflicts and paradoxes of these decades of disorienting change and mounting unrest, out of which emerged a modern nation whose characteristics resonate with the present day."--Jacket

Includes bibliographical essay (pages 873-901) and index

Part I: Reconstructing the nation. Prologue: Mourning Lincoln ; In the wake of the War ; Radical reconstruction ; The greater reconstruction ; Home ; Gilded liberals ; Triumph of wage labor ; Panic ; Beginning a second century -- Part II: The quest for prosperity. Years of violence ; The party of prosperity ; People in motion ; Liberal orthodoxy and radical opinions ; Dying for progress ; The great upheaval ; Reform ; Westward the course of reform ; The center fails to hold ; The poetry of a pound of steel -- Part III: The crisis arrives. The other half ; Dystopian and utopian America ; The Great Depression ; Things fall apart ; An era ends -- Conclusion

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